Spoilers: Do Not Watch Netflix's 'Fool Me Once'

By Dustin Rowles | TV | February 8, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | February 8, 2024 |

Fool Me Once is now the ninth most-popular English language TV show ever in the history of Netflix. Ever. It has managed 84.9M views in its first 35 days on Netflix, and it’s still climbing the list. On the strength of Fool Me Once, Netflix has signed Harlan Coben to two more adaptations, while Amazon has brought in the same Fool Me Once team to make another Harlan Coben series starring Bill Nighy.

Good for Harlan Coben. Honestly. I’ve been marginally entertained by a number of his series! But not this one. Not Fool Me Once, and though I have reviewed this series already, I feel a responsibility to reiterate that this show is bad, that it has a fatal unreliable narrator problem, and that the mystery is shit.

This is a spoiler, but I think you’ll understand why it’s necessary to spoil it so that no one wastes their time on this series. Briefly, the show is about a woman who is investigating the murder of her husband and the murder of her sister. For eight episodes, this woman runs around trying to solve the murder of her husband. She interviews witnesses. Puts her life at risk. Runs down leads, etc.

In the final episode, we find out that she murdered her husband because her husband murdered her sister. Again, the woman investigating the murder of her husband actually committed the murder because she knew, all along, that her husband was the answer to the other mystery — who killed her sister. The investigation was a sham. She was pretending the entire time. It is bullshit. Do not watch. I cannot emphasize this enough.

This has been a public service announcement from your friends at Pajiba.